A made-in-S'pore app that encrypts on the fly

[SINGAPORE] What started out as a search for an easy-to-use and affordable encryption tool eventually led two good friends to start a security business in Singapore.迷你倉將軍澳Banker and financier Michael Tse needed a secure way to distribute medical reports to more than 100 doctors using the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Centre, a medical facility he had set up in Hong Kong. Such reports were being distributed by courier to the doctors who were not stationed in the facility, and some got lost on the way.Finding point-to-point encryption solutions too expensive then, he turned to his Singaporean friend Kwok-Yan Lam, who has been teaching security in universities since 1990, for help. His request was that the solution had to be robust for the enterprise, yet simple enough for the consumer to use.The result was a Singapore-developed application that allows users to encrypt information easily on the fly by saving it in a password-protected folder.Called Soda, which stands for Safe of Data App, it acts as a "digital safe" in which encrypted files are organised into folders that can only be read by their intended users.Soda comes with a cross-platform capability, which means that data such as photos, videos and documents can be encrypted using an Android phone, saved to the cloud, then downloaded and decrypted even in an iPhone, iPad or PC. The file is automatically decrypted when opened in the Soda folder."Encryption is quite easy to do nowadays - there is a lot of freeware. The difficult part is how to do it in such a way that people use it easily without having to deal with technical interfaces," said Professor Lam, who is an exco member of the Singapore Association of Information Security Professionals and an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore. He has served as chief security consultant and architect for many local and regional projects on e-commerce and border control systems.Prof Lam noted that most users try to avoid encryption as it is too difficult to use. Yet mobile devices, which are goldmines of information due to the myriad personal and work-related activities that they are used for, can be easy targets for cyber criminals.To ensure a high迷你倉尖沙咀level of security even for enterprise users, Soda was built on the same proven cryptography platform (certified to The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Federal Information Processing Standards) used by banks and governments.The application is free for download in the iOS App Store and Android Google Play Store."People are not aware, or even if they are aware, they have no easy tool to protect their data. That is why the basic version is free of charge - we wanted to start something to educate people about personal privacy protection," said Prof Lam.A premium version, which allows individual users or small-sized businesses to enjoy unlimited sending of encrypted data, costs just US$4.99 per user a year.There is also a corporate version - Soda Enterprise - that is designed to work seamlessly with existing corporate IT infrastructure and offers more advanced features such as secure P2P sharing of confidential files, as well as secure file exchange and group messaging."To enterprises, Soda is not only an app but a software platform that supports mobile and cloud applications requiring strong privacy and confidentiality protection," said Mr Tse.Piloted among 300 users in Asia a year ago, the security application has been downloaded almost 1,000 times by users not just in Asia but also in the US and Europe. Mr Tse expects 500,000 downloads by the end of 2014.Soda has been used by the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy Centre to encrypt and send screening results to doctors since January.To promote the software, the duo set up Soda Pte Ltd in Singapore in January 2012.The start-up, which employs 12 people, also has sales and marketing offices in Hong Kong and Malaysia, and plans to expand its presence in South-east Asia in the near term.It is targeting telecommunications service providers offering cloud storage, banks that need to issue electronic statements and government agencies, among others.In all, over $1 million have been injected into the company, and Mr Tse, who serves as its chairman, hopes to achieve 50-100 corporate sign-ups and break even by the end of 2014. Customers currently include organisations in the telecommunications and public sectors.倉